Ramachandra Guha's Blog, page 17

The Cricketing Tradition of Gandhi’s Kathiawar, The Telegraph

When, in September 1888, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi travelled to London to study law, he was carrying letters of introduction to four people. One was Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, who also hailed from Kathiawar. Gandhi did not meet Ranji then, nor did the two come across each another in subsequent decades, when one became a major political leader, and the other a famous cricketer and ruler of a princely state. So far as I can tell, these two Kathiawaris did not meet face-to-face—but they did meet...

The Man Who Knew Almost Everything, The Nation

Eric Hobsbwam, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. Little, Brown and Company. 213. Pp xv+319.

I first read Eric Hobsbawm as a doctoral student in Kolkata in the 1980s. I started with his books on popular protest, Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), before moving on to his trilogy on the ages, respectively, of revolution, capital, and empire. In October 2012, when Hobsbawm died, aged ninety-five, I happened to be in London. Curious to see how a historian of s...

Nehru’s Nationalism – and Ours, The Telegraph

One of the books I read as a boy was the autobiography of the mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. I grew up in Dehradun, in a home with fine views of the lower Himalaya. From the nearby hill station of Mussoorie—which we visited often—one could see the great snow peaks of Nanda Devi, Trishul, and Bandar Poonch. As an asthmatic child, I couldn’t climb steep slopes myself, which may be why I read Tenzing’s memoir over and over again.

There are two episodes in that book that have stayed with me. One is...

Gandhi’s English Housemates, The Independent

In April 1931, Mohandas K. Gandhi attended an inter-faith meeting in Bombay. He had just been released from one of his many terms in prison. Now, while listening to Christian hymns and Sanskrit slokas, he had as his companions the Admiral’s daughter Madeleine Slade (known in India as Mirabehn) and the Oxford scholar Verrier Elwin. Thus, as Elwin wrote to his family afterwards, ‘this “Enemy of the British Empire” sat for his prayer between two Britishers!’

Gandhi’s first English friend was a do...

Some African Gandhians, The Telegraph

I have been reading the memoirs of the Kenyan novelist

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Here Ngugi writes of how, as a little boy in the 1940s, he saw pictures of a mysterious bespectacled man in the shop of an Indian merchant near his village. A schoolteacher told Ngugi of who that man was and what he meant to their lives. ‘The British had colonized India for hundreds of years’, said the teacher: ‘Led by Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, Indian people demanded their independence. Just like our people are now doing...

Politicians and Pluralism, The Telegraph

Indian pluralism was always hard won. The riots during Partition produced an enormous sense of insecurity among India’s minorities. Mahatma Gandhi’s death, by creating a sense of shock and outrage, allowed Jawaharlal Nehru’s Government to isolate extremist Hindus, and bring the mainstream towards a more moderate, inclusive, plural sense of what it meant to be Indian. Through the 1950s there were no major communal riots. This allowed the Government to unite the nation by framing a democratic a...

Development or Destruction?, The Telegraph

Thirty years, a group of students from Delhi University went on a long walking tour of the Narmada Valley. The journey was arduous, and it was not undertaken for pleasure. The students wished to study, at first-hand, ‘the possible environmental impact of the massive hydroelectric and irrigation complex planned for the Valley, and to see and document the existing natural and cultural heritage of the [Narmada] river’. They wrote a report based on their trip, versions of which were published in...

The Poison of Partisanship, The Telegraph

Earlier this year, I was discussing partisanship in Indian politics with a friend from Bangalore temporarily based in Boston. In no other democracy, I suggested, did the two major parties use such vile language about one another. When the Government of India chose to allow foreign direct investment in the retail sector, the Chief Minister of Gujarat asked the Prime Minister how many Italian businessmen would benefit from this change in policy. The vulgarity was in character. There were weight...

Good Man Good Artist, The Telegraph

I first heard of Sunil Janah in 1980. I was then much taken with the work of the British-Indian anthropologist Verrier Elwin. A friend in Kolkata, the green activist Bonani Kakkar, said that if I was interested in Elwin I must meet her mamu, who had worked closely with him. However, I was visually illiterate, and had never heard of a man who was one of India’s finest photographers. Bonani filled me in on some of the details.

Three decades later, I (and everyone else) can revisit the life and l...

A Nehruvian in China, Caravan

The first Chinese intellectual I knew of was named Fei Xiaotong. The year was 1980, and I was beginning a doctoral degree in sociology in Kolkata. The city was hostile to my discipline, largely because its intellectual culture was Marxist-dominated and Maoist-infested. Those who read Marxism mechanically allowed that the disciplines of history, economics, and political science had a place in scholarly enquiry. For Marx spoken often of the practice of ‘political economy’; whereas his acolyte E...